Message in a Bottle (12 page)

Garrett watched her as she did it. She was shorter than he was—about five feet seven, he guessed—with a lovely face and a figure that reminded him of models he had seen in magazines. But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing.

In a way, when he looked at her, he was reminded of Catherine. Especially her expression. She looked as though she were daydreaming as she watched the water, and he felt his thoughts wandering back to the last time they had sailed together. Again he felt guilty, though he did his best to push aside the feelings. He shook his head and absently adjusted his watchband, first loosening it, then tightening it back in its original position.

“It’s really beautiful out here,” she finally said as she turned toward him. “Thanks for inviting me along.”

He was glad when she broke the silence.

“You’re welcome. It’s nice to have some company once in a while.”

She smiled at his answer, wondering if he meant it. “Do you usually sail alone?”

He leaned back as he spoke, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Usually. It’s a good way to unwind after work. No matter how stressful the day is, once I get out here, the wind seems to blow it all away.”

“Is diving that hard?”

“No, it’s not the diving. That’s the fun part. It’s more or less everything else. The paperwork, dealing with people who cancel their lessons at the last minute, making sure the shop has the right amount of everything. It can make for a long day.”

“I’m sure. But you like it, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do. I wouldn’t trade what I do for anything.” He paused and adjusted the watch on his wrist. “So, Theresa, what do you do?” It was one of the few safe questions he’d thought up during the course of the day.

“I’m a columnist for the Boston Times.”

“Here on vacation?”

She paused only slightly before answering. “You could say that.”

He nodded, expecting the answer. “What do you write about?”

She smiled. “I write about parenting.”

She saw the surprised look in his eyes, the same look she saw whenever she dated someone new. You may as well get this over with right away, she thought to herself. “I have a son,” she went on. “He’s twelve.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Twelve?”

“You look shocked.”

“I am. You don’t look old enough to have a twelve-year-old.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said with a smirk, not rising to the bait. She wasn’t quite ready to betray her age. “But, yes, he is twelve. Would you like to see a picture?”

“Sure,” he said.

She found her wallet, took out the photo, and handed it to him. Garrett stared at it for a moment, then glanced at her.

“He has your coloring,” he said, handing the picture back. “He’s a good-looking boy.”

“Thank you.” As she was putting the picture away, she asked, “How about you? Do you have any children?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No kids. At least none that I know of.”

She chuckled at his answer, and he went on: “What’s your son’s name?”

“Kevin.”

“Is he here in town with you?”

“No, he’s with his father in California. We divorced a few years ago.”

Garrett nodded without judgment, then looked over his shoulder at another sailboat passing in the distance. Theresa watched it for a moment as well, and in the silence, she noticed how peaceful it was on the ocean compared to the Intracoastal. The only sounds now came from the sail as the wind rippled through it and the water as Happenstance cut its way through the waves. She thought their voices sounded different from the way they had on the docks. Out here they sounded almost free, as if the open air would carry them forever.

“Would you like to see the rest of the boat?” Garrett asked.

She nodded. “I’d love to.”

Garrett rose and checked the sails again before leading the way inside, Theresa one step behind him. When he opened the door he paused, suddenly overcome by the fragment of a memory, long buried but shaken loose, perhaps by the newness of this woman’s presence.

Catherine sat at the small table with a bottle of wine already open. In front of her, a vase with a single flower caught the light of a small burning candle. The flame swayed with the boat’s motion, casting long shadows across the interior of the hull. In the semidarkness, he could just make out the ghost of a smile.

“I thought this would be a nice surprise,” she said. “We haven’t eaten by candlelight in a while.”

Garrett looked to the small stove. Two foil-wrapped plates sat beside it.

“When did you get all this on the boat?”

“While you were at work.”

Theresa moved around him silently, leaving him to the privacy of his thoughts. If she had noticed his hesitation, she gave no sign, and for that, Garrett was grateful.

On Theresa’s left, a seat ran along one side of the boat—wide and long enough for someone to sleep comfortably; directly opposite the seat on the other side was a small table with room enough for two people to sit. Near the door were a sink and stove burner with a small refrigerator underneath, and straight ahead was a door that led to the sleeping cabin.

He stood off to one side with his hands on his hips as she explored the interior, looking at everything. He didn’t hover over her shoulder as some men would have but instead gave her space. Still, she could feel his eyes watching her, though he wasn’t obvious about it. After a moment she said, “From the outside, you wouldn’t think it’s as large as it is.”

“I know.” Garrett cleared his throat awkwardly. “Surprising, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. It looks like it has everything you need, though.”

“It does. If I wanted, I could sail her to Europe, not that I’d recommend it. But it’s great for me.”

He stepped around her and went to the refrigerator, bending over to pull a can of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator. “Are you up for something to drink yet?”

“Sure,” she said. She ran her hands along the walls, feeling the texture of the wood.

“What would you like? I’ve got SevenUp or Coke.”

“SevenUp’s fine,” she answered.

He stood and handed her the can. Their fingers touched briefly as she took it.

“I don’t have any ice on board, but it’s cold.”

“I’ll try to rough it,” she said, and he smiled.

She opened it and took a swallow before setting it on the table.

As he opened his own can of soda, he looked at her, thinking about what she’d said earlier. She had a twelve-year-old son . . . and as a columnist, that meant she probably went to college. If she’d waited until after then to get married and have a child . . . that would make her about four or five years older than he was. She didn’t look that much older—that much was certain—but she didn’t act like most of the twenty-somethings he knew in town. There was a maturity to her actions, something that came only to those who had experienced their share of highs and lows in life.

Not that it mattered.

She turned her attention to a framed photograph that hung on the wall. In it, Garrett Blake was standing on a pier with a marlin he’d caught, looking much younger than he was now. In the photo he was smiling broadly, and his buoyant expression reminded her of Kevin whenever he scored a goal in soccer.

Into the sudden lull she said, “I see you like to fish.” She pointed toward the picture. He stepped toward her, and once he was close, she felt the warmth radiating from him. He smelled like salt and wind.

“Yeah, I do,” he said quietly. “My father was a shrimper, and I pretty much grew up on the water.”

“How long ago was this taken?”

“That one’s about ten years old—it was taken right before I went back to college for my senior year. There was a fishing contest, and my dad and I decided to spend a couple of nights out in the Gulf Stream and we caught that marlin about sixty miles off shore. It took almost seven hours to bring him in because my dad wanted me to learn how to do it the old-fashioned way.”

“What does that mean?”

He laughed under his breath. “Basically it means that my hands were cut to pieces by the time I was finished, and I could barely move my shoulders the next day. The line we had hooked it on wasn’t really strong enough for a fish that size, so we had to let the marlin run until it stopped, then slowly reel it in, then let it run again all day long until the thing was too exhausted to fight anymore.”

“Kind of like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.”

“Kind of, except that I didn’t feel like an old man until the next day. My father, on the other hand, could have played the part in the movie.”

She looked at the picture again. “Is that your father standing next to you?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“He looks like you,” she said.

Garrett smiled a little, wondering whether or not it was a compliment. He motioned to the table, and Theresa sat down opposite him. Once she was comfortable, she asked:

“You said you went to college?”

He met her eyes. “Yeah, I went to UNC and majored in marine biology. Nothing else interested me much, and since my dad told me I couldn’t come home without a degree, I thought I’d learn something that I might be able to use later.”

“So you bought the shop. . . .”

He shook his head. “No, at least not right away. After graduating, I worked for the Duke Maritime Institute as a dive specialist, but there wasn’t much money in that. So, I got a teaching certificate and started taking in students on the weekends. The shop came a few years later.” He cocked an eyebrow. “How about you?”

Theresa took another drink of the SevenUp before she answered.

“My life isn’t quite as exciting as yours. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and went to school at Brown. After graduation, I bounced around in a couple of different places and tried a few different things, eventually settling down in Boston. I’ve been with the Times for nine years now, but only the last few as a columnist. Before that, I was a reporter.”

“How do you like being a columnist?”

She thought about it for a moment, as if she were considering it for the first time.

“It’s a good job,” she finally said. “A lot better now than when I started. I can pick Kevin up after school, and I have the freedom to write whatever I want, as long as it’s in line with my column. It pays fairly well, too, so I can’t complain about that, but . . .”

She paused again. “It’s not all that challenging anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I like what I do, but sometimes I feel like I’m writing the same things over and over. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, though, if I didn’t have so many other things to do with Kevin. I guess that right now, I’m your typical, overworked single mother, if you know what I mean.”

He nodded and spoke softly. “Life doesn’t often turn out the way we think it will, does it?”

“No, I guess it doesn’t,” she said, and again she caught his gaze. His expression made her wonder if he’d said something he rarely said to anyone else. She smiled and leaned toward him.

“Are you ready for something to eat? I brought some things in the basket.”

“Whenever you are.”

“I hope you like sandwiches and cold salads. They were the only things I could think of that wouldn’t spoil.”

“It sounds better than what I would have had. If it was just me, I probably would have stopped for a burger before I went out tonight. Would you like to eat down here or outside?”

“Outside, definitely.”

They picked up their cans of soda and left the cabin. On their way out, Garrett grabbed a raincoat from a peg near the door and motioned for her to go on without him. “Give me a minute to drop the anchor,” he said, “so we can eat without having to check the boat every few minutes.” Theresa reached her seat and opened the basket she had brought with her. On the horizon, the sun was sinking into a bank of cumulus clouds. She pulled out a couple of sandwiches wrapped in cellophane, as well as some Styrofoam containers of coleslaw and potato salad.

She watched as Garrett set aside the coat and lowered the sails, the boat slowing almost immediately. With his back to her as he worked, she again noticed how strong he looked. From where she was sitting, his shoulder muscles appeared larger than she had first realized, amplified by his small waist. She couldn’t believe she was actually sailing with this man when only two days ago she was in Boston. The whole thing seemed unreal.

While Garrett worked steadily, Theresa looked upward. The breeze had picked up now that the temperature had dropped, and the sky was darkening slowly.

Once the boat had stopped completely, Garrett lowered the anchor. He waited about a minute, making sure the anchor would hold, and when he was satisfied, he took his seat next to Theresa.

“I wish there was something I could do to help you,” Theresa said with a smile. She flipped her hair onto her shoulder the same way Catherine used to, and for a moment he didn’t say anything.

“Is everything okay?” Theresa asked.

He nodded, suddenly uncomfortable again. “We’re fine right here. But I was just thinking that if the wind keeps picking up, we’ll have to tack a bit more often on our way back.”

She put some potato salad and coleslaw along with his sandwich on his plate and handed it to him, conscious of the fact that he was sitting closer than he had before.

“Will it take longer to get back, then?”

Garrett reached for one of the white plastic forks and took a bite of coleslaw. It took a moment for him to answer.

“A little—but it won’t be a problem unless the wind stops completely. If that happens, we’d be stuck.”

“I take it that’s happened to you before.”

He nodded. “Once or twice. It’s rare, but it does happen.”

She looked confused. “Why is that rare? The wind doesn’t always blow, does it?”

“On the ocean it usually does.”

“How come?”

He smiled in amusement and set the sandwich on his plate. “Well, winds are driven by differences in temperature—when warm air rushes to cooler air. For the wind to stop blowing when you’re out on the ocean, you’d need the air temperature to exactly equal the water temperature for miles around. Down here, the air is usually hot during the day, but as soon as the sun starts to set, the temperature drops quickly. That’s why the best time to go out is at dusk. The temperature is changing constantly, and that makes for great sailing.”